Command Control Power: Apple Tech Support & Business Talk

Special Thanks to our friends:

• Jerry recently took the Addigy Certified Expert training

• Text Sniper is an incredibly useful tool that is like OCR for your screen: https://www.textsniper.app.

• Jerry uses it during a presentation to capture text for notes.

• Addigy integrating Splashtop is a welcome addition to their feature set for remote support.

• Joe tells a funny story about Outlook reminders in his latest peeves corner.

• He prefers first party because he likes to know Apple’s solution first and know the ins and outs.

• The group discusses Mail issues.

• Western Digital MyCloud Drive isn’t our favorite choice for customers.

• We have to choose the right equipment or software for our clients based on what is right for them but also what we can support well.

• Sam shares a funny story about trying to talk to a tech person at Staples.

• Should the group start a show where they go to local stores and ask tech questions?

• Joe talks about the times before he was an Apple consultant and shares the story about how he found out about the Apple Consultants Network.

• Is Sam Neo from the Matrix?

• The crew talks about older, unreliable software like Retrospect

• Jerry has an internet recovery issue with a local Mac mini acting as a content cache

• Jerry talks about the used Mcintosh amplifier from 1967 he recently got for himself.

• He gives a warning about energizing older products like this because it can be dangerous.

• What is appropriate to wear on the job?

• Sam shares a story about his clients dog ripping his brand new corduroys.

• There’s a certain value you provide when you dress the part.

• Joe shares some of his favorite button down shirts.

• The group discusses raising rates and how to communicate that you are doing so with clients.

• Sam explains that he has stopped giving discounts to new clients to win them over because he charges what his services are worth.

• Jerry likes to slowly creep his rates up so it isn’t a huge jump.

• Sam recently increased his hourly rates and he explains how he’d rather have longer term relationships with his clients and his pricing shows that.

• Adding valuable monthly services helps you to bill outside of hourly labor.

• The group discusses billing for network monitoring.

For this week’s episode of Command Control Power, we have decided to run a little experiment. We are making this episode a patron only feature. You can find this episode if you are a supporter of Command Control Power on Patreon. You can also click on the Support link in the menu above. Sign up if you are not yet a supporter. If you are a supporter of the show, you can simply log in to Patreon and you will be able to enjoy this week’s episode which we promise is extra juicy. It has some interesting client issues and interactions and we think you will enjoy hearing it. Let us know your feedback if you do. In the meantime, enjoy a highlight from an older episode.

Sam Valencia, Jerry Zigmont and Joe Saponare discuss working with Apple technology and clients. Drawn from their combined experience of over 20 years in the Apple Consultants Network, they discuss technical support issues both with the technology and working with clients.

Special Thanks to our friends:

-A family approaches Jerry about retrieving data from a Mac SE. The story has some depth to it outside of the technical.  -Jerry gets an assist with the Emu, which behaves exactly like a real disk drive, requiring no special software or drivers: https://www.bigmessowires.com/floppy-emu/ -A tool available in Windows to view these files was http://a2ciderpress.com -Another win was an online file converter called http://convertio.co -Joe had some anecdotes about older Mac computers and accessories he had in high school.  -WWJD (What Would Joe Do)? -TextExpander was proving to be troublesome for Jerry and he was given an interesting workaround involving Mission Control.  -Some other tools we like are Keyboard Maestro and Alfred -Jerry puts Joe on the hot seat about taxes. Joe actually has a story to tell about dealing with the IRS.  -Are chicken coops tax deductible? -Pro Tip - fast.com for speed tests.  -Joe recommends Proton Mail for secure email communication. Especially for data at rest.  -mail-tester.com is recommended by Proton Mail to test security of your email messages. 

Season 8 is here!

• Thank you to our long time sponsor, Jon Brown of Grove Technologies for his continued and increased support of Command Control Power.

• If you would like to contribute to the show, please visit http://patreon.com/cmdctrlpwr

• In the latest “I should have known this” corner, Joe learned something new about widgets from the TidBITs newsletter.

• Sam adds another TidBITs tip about AirTags.

• Jerry revisits the Mouse Jiggler app from Episode 246: Let Go Of My Echo or Echo Location that helped his Fusion Drive encryption proceed, and shares some excellent feedback from Tom Bridge re: encryption requiring the mouse to be moving. Tom suspected Apple is "using the entropy from the mouse cursor to do part of the encryption" which is apparently the case in High Sierra with APFS (although Jerry's drive was not APFS). 

• Jiggler 1.9 : No-Doz for your Mac

  http://sticksoftware.com/software/Jiggler.html

• A benefit to working remotely is that the client won’t see every time you have to google an answer!

• Sam purchased a 13 inch MacBook pro M1 and then somehow a random serial number got added to his apple business manager.

• He made the mistake of not listening to Joe’s rules for making a new migration work properly.

• Joe and Sam are both very happy with their newer M1 computers since they finally have devices that can keep up with everything they do.

• Jerry suggests Synology Migration Assistant because it works very well for him.

• While completing a migration Jerry ran into a password problem.

• Both Joe & Jerry have gathered a treasure-trove of knowledge from a series of YouTube videos from SpaceRex. He has put out helpful videos that can improve Synology performance like this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AYEEfAI-Upo

• Little tips like disabling SMB1 or SMB encryption on Synology to increase speeds have been helpful.

• Jerry also talks about the realities link aggregation.

• Always consider the quality of drives you add to your drive array.

• Avoid SMR (Shingled Magnetic Recording) drives and look instead for CMR (Conventional Magnetic Recording) drives.

• “Cache” is king.

• Jerry has a real issue with terrible unboxing videos.

• Jerry would love to have a better partner relationship with Synology.

• Joe wants to talk more about ransomware, malware, and protecting your data more in future episodes.

• Important tip: Always have a backup!

• There are risks to relying solely on backups without an “air gap”.

• Sam and Joe highly recommends the Security Advisor on Synology

Apple Consultants Network members Joe Saponare, Sam Valencia and Jerry Zigmont discuss working with Apple technology and clients in their consulting practices. Today they speak with James Chiappetta, Security Expert From BetterAppsec.com

• Sam gives a shoutout to Armin Briegel of Scripting OS X for solving a huge problem he was having. If you’re not subscribing to his site, you should be.

• Being a part of the Mac Admins community is invaluable.

• Joe talks about creating a custom AppleScript to sync data in the Photos app. Jerry brings up an interesting point about support over the network.

• Note to self: Triple the estimate when quoting a scripting/automation job!

• The group talks about their automation processes.

• One of Sam’s old difficult clients who he had not talked to in years reached out to him for help. He was not sure how to respond.

• Joe shared a similar story about a client who rebook things off with him coming back after years.

• Jerry says that taking notes can be extremely helpful especially when trying to remember what happened with a client in the past. Daylite is an excellent tool for documenting this information and attaching to a client record.

• Sam tried to part ways with a client that was very time consuming but he didn’t have the heart.

• Joe shares a tip on setting up hot corners because even though they’ve been useful, they also drive him crazy.

• Shoutout to the TidBits content newsletter for sharing tips that even the professionals don’t know!

• This week we are joined by Annie Chen, the VP of product management at Splashtop.

• Splashtop is a Silicon Valley company founded in 2006 that started off as a browser based product.

• Today they focus on remote access to your devices, working closely with GPU manufacturers to optimize and leverage hardware encoding to achieve high performance.

• Jerry commends Splashtop on the feature parity and he talks about how Mac had seemed to always receive the short end of the stick with other remote access products.

• Splashtop has three major offerings: Splashtop Business Access, Splashtop Remote Support - useful for MSPs looking to replace their RMM products, and Splashtop SOS for quick remote access.

• It is easy to try out and adjust to Splashtop, which Jerry found really helpful.

• Sam recently tried to use SOS with a customer and ran up against macOS security settings but was able to deal with it by blindly typing in admin credentials on a Mac

• Annie explains how the Safe Reboot feature works, which will help you reboot a computer remotely without losing access.

• Jerry likes how the screens that Splashtop SOS presents to the clients because it makes it easier for them to know what to do.

• Joe has been really happy with the consumer side of Splashtop as well.

• With Splashtop’s next version release, Mac Streamer will support native hardware encoding.

• They have recently formalized their MSP support group and an advisory panel.

• Splashtop is also working on having a specific build for M1 that they hope will be a universal binary and installed on Mac as a whole.

• They have just launches a monthly subscription plan for Splashtop’s remote support product.

• With Splashtop your subscription can grow as your business does.

• The group is impressed with Splashtop’s feature set in general.

• Jerry mentioned how Splashtop’s competitor would show advertisements even though you paid for the product.

• Focusing on security and protection, Splashtop has set up a security advisory counsel as well.

• Annie says the remote support and SOS products are really great for MSPs and service class teams.

• Visit Splashtop.com to set up a free trial and see what all the fuss is about.

Special Thanks to our friends:

• This week we are excited to be joined by Jason Dettbarn, the founder and CEO of Addigy.

• Dates for The Addigy User Summit have been booked for February, 2022: https://addigy.com/event/addigy-user-summit-2020/

• Throughout the pandemic, they started seeing more VPN and remote control technology being put into use in order to manage devices.

• COVID forced the whole IT industry to improve, since everything had to be done remotely.

• Jason explains how the pandemic has actually effected his business positively.

• Take a European summer this summer authorized by Jason Dettbarn.

• Sam and Jerry think Joe’s been on a break for the past three years.

• Joe thanks Jason for the great product he’s created, specifically Addigy LiveDesktop while he does one of his famous remote migrations.

• Additional remote control capabilities will be announced at their Innovation Summit.

• Join Addigy for their Innovation Summit on June 15! https://addigy.com/innovate2021/

• Quick Tip for Addigy users: Joe has a URL on his site for users to enroll into Addigy on the fly to allow management when they need it.

• Addigy will be adding variables to their Custom Facts in an upcoming update.

• Custom criteria will be added to allow auto assigning devices to a particular policy.

• Addigy is the only multi tenancy solution to allow Single Sign-On for Mac.

• Apps & Books deployment is now available in Self Service.

• Thomas Reed from Malwarebytes will be joining the security panel of the Innovation Summit.

• Addigy places a big value on community.

• The Custom Fact feature allows you to report custom criteria about a computer that isn’t built into Addigy.

• The community aspect is what allowed such a quick remediation of Silver Sparrow.

• “Day zero” support is already too late. Jason explains how Addigy prepares.

• The Command Control Power crew had their own Addigy Summit.

• Use all of the features available to you when installing Addigy.

• Addigy Certified Expert, Addigy Certified Associate certifications are available from Addigy: https://addigy.com/training/

• Joe talks about maintaining software updates using Addigy.

• Content caching is a feature that will explored in the near future.

• Jerry has a theory about kernel panic alerts he has seen from some of his users.

• Don’t forget about the Addigy Innovate Summit on June 15th! https://addigy.com/innovate2021/